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        "We suddenly found that one of our home servers had been
        turned into a repository for MP3s of the world's worst pop
        music. All the guy's friends knew about it too, and they
        downloaded several GB of files in the three days it was up"
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/10/ednote/ednote0110.asp
... have any of you non-Microsoft people ever heard of such a thing?


                                >> HARD NEWS <<
                              smoothed, criminal

         MICHAEL JACKSON's new single seems likely to "Rock Your
         World" in more ways than one, as promotional copies sent out
         by Sony appear to be the first examples spotted "in the
         wild" of audio CDs which won't play in PC CD-ROM drives.
         "When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously
         as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank
         or corrupted CDR", reports our correspondent, a producer and
         sound engineer, adding: "None of our stand-alone
         professional or domestic CD players had a problem with it".
         Of course, this is exactly what Macrovision's SafeAudio (or
         similar copy-protection systems) are intended to do: insert
         "bad" error-correction codes, which audio CD players can
         interpolate around, but higher-precision CD-ROM drives
         don't, effectively preventing you from ripping (or listening
         to) any tracks on your PC. The UK's Campaign for Digital
         Rights (formerly the "Free Dmitry Sklyarov" guys) are still
         planning a leafleting campaign alerting shoppers to this
         ingenious reduction of their music's self-healing properties
         (making CDs more susceptible to scratches or other damage) -
         though perhaps an "explicit lyrics"-style labelling system
         wouldn't go amiss either, for those of us who just don't own
         a non-CD-ROM CD player.
         http://uazu.net/cd/
                   - like anyone with a PC is still buying CDs anyway
         http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/08/encrypt.html
            - apparently not as good as Jacko's earlier, audible work

         We're all looking for safety in this insecure world: it just
         happens that some of us aren't looking very hard. Ploughing
         through the usual inbox of obscure and deliciously open
         Webservers, we were very hard pushed this week to select the
         most embarrassing lack of home security. Was it the
         university clearing service UCAS, who popped onto their
         public ftp server what appears to be a list of some three
         hundred thousand students who accepted a place at Uni this
         year (with their home addresses)? Or was it the folks at
         FORESIGHT.CO.UK, whose staging server, while ingeniously
         hidden under the http://stage.foresight.co.uk/ URL, still
         remains publically accessible - avec private intranet - to
         the rest of the world. Or maybe, just maybe, it was ACORN
         USER, whose last CD included a free RISCOS Web Browser -
         together with the magazine's own selection of personal
         cookies, including AU reader Brian O'Carroll's Amazon
         preferences, as well as site ids for voyeurgals.com,
         amateurpie.com, and perhaps most scandalous of all for the
         true believers, MSN?
         ftp://ftp.ucas.ac.uk/pub/accept_home.csv
                                       - gone now; don't do it again!
         http://stage.foresight.co.uk/
                                      - going down any second ... now
 http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=ant1423570b0r2wt%40194.72.192.6
                - or British Telecom. British Telecom would be worse.

         Answering our own question: no. By tradition, all system
         weaknesses, no matter how entertaining, are always trumped
         by use of the infamous ALL@DEMON.NET security hole, whereby
         company-wide Demon resignation notices always seem to get
         bounced to our tips address (what are we, Demon's secondary
         MX?). Good to see the exploit is still open, even as
         employees are *supposed* to use all@thus.net when firing off
         their wide-ranging, self-destructive attacks. "all@thus.net
         mailing list does not go to all staff. Hence the mail to
         all[@demon.net]", writes the resignee, before settling in
         for the argy-bargy. It's all here: the homely IRC
         references, the sideswipes at the non-Net management, the
         call to the pub, the delicious literary references. We
         eagerly await the traditional Demon management response,
         which,  judging from last time, consists of a string of
         abuse aimed at the ex-employee, followed by the swift exit
         of the manager himself. Demon: however it may change, still
         the bestest, most fun-packed of ISPs.
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/goodbye.txt
                                               -  "Drink until dead."
         http://www.ntk.net/index.cgi?back=archive99/now0319.txt&line=55#l
                                     - zey call it zee "Bliss effect"


                                >> ANTI-NEWS <<
                             berating the obvious

         mysterious Glasgow-based letter-writer to LONDON METRO:
         http://www.ntk.net/2001/09/21/dohmetro.jpg imitates San
         Francisco-based SALON columnist of exactly the same name:
         http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afghanistan/ ...
         RICHARD DAWKINS declares war on all religions everywhere,
         offers personal arsenal of pigeon-guided cruise missiles:
       http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4257777,00.html
         ... YAHOO search for hijackers' names "inconclusive", reports:
         http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46991-2,00.html -
         "Some names were close to those of the hijackers, while others
         didn't match up at all"... striking family resemblance:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1544000/1544871.stm
         ... SPACE.COM identifies another likely culprit - gravity:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/wtc_science_010919.html
         ... godless "Other Realm" teen threatens further "zappings":
         http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0671027026.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg
         ... and, hopefully concluding our coverage for now, good to
         see everyone mucking in: http://www.webgirlauction.com/ ...
         lame "last page of net" gag: http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html
         has two links leaving it... master of camouflage, Privet Ryan:
         http://freewarepalm.com/hobbies/moviecritic.shtml ... hope
         CHORUS have registered that popular www.PORTAL NAME.ie domain:
         http://www.chorus.ie/broadband.html ... very trusting, these
      small NZ communities: http://www.swktodc.govt.nz/Fix-o-gram.htm ...


                               >> EVENT QUEUE <<
                         goto's considered non-harmful

         This year, some of the speculation on how to "save" UK games
         trade show ECTS has dwelled on whether it should be open to
         the public and thus become more of a LIVE 2001-style mass-
         market exercise in soul-destroying corporate PR (from 10am
         today, Friday 2001-09-21, Birmingham NEC, UKP12.50 on the
         door). Sapping your will to live this year are opportunities
         to "have your picture taken with a Sun Page 3 girl", "show off
         your knowledge of the mobile communications industry" and to
         "ooh" and "ahh" at the UK's debut unveiling of MICROSOFT
         WINDOWS XP, which seems to be a long-overdue security patch
         for the popular virus-propagating operating system. We kid you
         not, last time we saw a MS product launch at one of these
         events (admittedly quite a while ago), they were facepainting
         the kids in the crowd with the "Windows" logo.
         http://www.livexpo.co.uk/LIVEnews.asp?ID=47
         - site requires Flash, for no immediately obvious reason
         http://ecoplan.org/carfreeday/
         - apparently Saturday is also "National Chocolate Day"


                                >> TRACKING <<
               sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering

         Hack, hack, hack. X-Windows 4.0's support for antialiasing
         was a fine, timely hack by Keith Packard; rewriting
         application widget libraries like Qt and GTK 2.0 to support
         it are an ongoing piece of hackery in themselves; but in
         terms of master-kludge, shaolin philosopher Josh Parson's
         GDKXFT beats them all. It's a stomp-in replacement for the
         GTK+ font functions that lets almost all Gnome apps
         instantly fuzz over with antialiased fonts. Some fiddling is
         required: in particular, you may have to stick in a
         LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/gdkxft.so before your set-up pays any
         attention. Also it won't work with Mozilla or
         gnome-terminal, can crash your X-server, won't work with
         every font, and when you do get it working, you generally
         can't tell the difference. Which teaches you an important
         lesson: Apart from ruining GIFs in the GIMP, why did you
         want AA in the first place? Oh, yeah: hack value.
         http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/
                        - isn't easier to just take your glasses off?


                                >> MEMEPOOL <<
                              hasta la altavista

         eyes of BUNGLE: http://www.widdy.demon.co.uk/rainbow/head.htm
         ... old man MOVIES: http://seanbaby.com/ifls/ ... it's lucky
         we only run unconfirmable RADIO 1 ban lists, isn't it?
         http://dotmusic.com/news/September2001/news21910.asp versus
         http://www.snopes2.com/inboxer/hoaxes/radio.htm ... you know
         when you've been playing first-person shooters too long:
         http://personal.mco.bellsouth.net/mco/g/r/gregts/ ... and
         you really know you've been watching too many ads when:
         http://www.slipups.com/items/15971.html ... hey, what's wrong
         with the timeless "don't try and ram the station, or vipers'll
         get you" analogy? http://www.ibell.co.uk/vortex/castle/ ...
         when retro and case-mods collide (the first, we bet, of many):
         http://www.globalpublicationspress.com/retrocase/ ... the
         irony being - it's not funny: http://www.opengiggle.org/ ...
         it's the little samurai headband its wearing that worries us:
         http://www.intercorr.com/roach.htm ... in 2001AD, THARG promised
         all the city blocks would be named after present-day celebs:
         http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/ ... ugh! bugs! crawling over my - face!
         http://chat.q42.net/?url=www.ntk.net (IE only) ... kill us both,
         SPOCK: http://www.thebrainstrust.co.uk/article.17.2002.html ...


                                >> GEEK MEDIA <<
                        the less rude www.tvgohome.com

         TV>> in the future, all celebrities, world leaders and tech
         standards will be selected via the tried-and-tested process of
         auditioning idiotic hopefuls on TV, as seen this week in MODEL
         BEHAVIOUR (6pm, Fri, C4) and BEST INVENTIONS (7.30pm, Wed,
         BBC1)... the "mobile phone" edition of UNREPORTED WORLD
         (7.30pm, Fri, C4) so far remains untransmitted due to extended
         news coverage... LOS DOS BROS (10.40pm, Fri, C4) is a sketch
         show with the blokes out of "Smack The Pony". Hello?... and
         the BBC stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the rugged frontier
         spirit in extended song-adaptation CONVOY (11.15pm, Fri, BBC1)
         ... Dani Behr - who you may have thought was dead - and Joe
         Mace - who you may have hoped was - present grimly jovial
         SM:TV knock-off THE SATURDAY SHOW (9am, Sat, BBC1)... scanners
         indicate a small but significant risk of Kevin Warwick
         punditry in AI tie-in THE ANDROID PROPHECY (11.50pm, Sat, C4),
         handily followed by "Terminator" knock-off APEX (1am, Sat,
         C4), and preceded by TOP TEN TV LOSERS (9.10pm, Sat, C4)...
         up against arguably Jim Carrey's most satisfying film, LIAR
         LIAR (9.15pm, Sat, ITV1), and combined Julianne "Hannibal"
         Moore, Lori "VR5" Singer and Huey "Back To The Future" Lewis
         nudity in comparatively watchable Altman portmanteau SHORT
         CUTS (11.55pm, Sat, BBC2) ... Sherilyn Fenn's NIGHTMARE STREET
         (11.15pm, Mon, BBC1) begins a week of former "Twin Peaks"
         contributors failing to live up to their early promise - see
         also Lara Flynn Boyle in THE TEMP (11.05pm, Tue, BBC1) and
         David Lynch himself in LOST HIGHWAY (11.55pm, Tue, C5)... the
         makers of "Robot Wars" adapt their seemingly evergreen teatime
         format to paintball with X-FIRE (6pm, Tue, C4)... there's a
         double-bill of computer-graphic enhanced profiles of dead
         things - the Dodo in EXTINCT (9pm, Tue, C4), and racing driver
         Ayrton Senna in GOING CRITICAL (9.30pm, Tue, C4)... and, while
         the BBC pulled an unusually distressing CAPTAIN SCARLET this
         week (6.20pm, Mon, BBC2), C5 happily showed "Terminator 2",
         and show no sign of backing down from Spacey/Jackson face-off
         THE NEGOTIATOR (9pm, Tue, C5)... IN BUSINESS (8.30pm, Thu,
         Radio4) looks at the UK games biz... Nathan Barley art video
         "OneDotZero" spinoff ONE DOT TV is back (1.10am, Thu, C4)...
         and "Evil Dead" director Sam Raimi pops up in uninhibited
         Jules Verne "adaptation" JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
         (3.35pm, Fri, C5)...

         FILM>> it's the epically grim fairy-tale synthetic-emotion
         lost-child special-effects extravaganza that Spielberg has
         been trying to make all his life, but unfortunately that
         doesn't make it any easier to enjoy science-free sci-fi AI
        (http://www.capalert.com/capreports/artificialintelligence.htm :
         a nude boy behind an iced glass shield, covering himself with
         his hands; much talk about sex; sexual conquest; sexual
         servicing, anatomy and use of robots for sex toys; telepathy;
         equating sex with love; excessive cleavage before a child;
         statue nudity, some quite vulgar)... following the hilariously
         downbeat Startup.com, the other side of the dotcom dream is
         explored when Wayne "Smoke" Wang and his DV cam imitate
         http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/9/linux_laid.html in grainy
         arthouse nerdporn THE CENTER OF THE WORLD (http://www.cndb.com :
         porn star Alisha Klass cameos as a stripper; [Molly Parker]
         has cute small breasts; [Peter Sarsgarrd's] balls at least are
         clearly visible in one shot when he bends down) - now *that's*
         AI: http://www.center-of-the-world.com/chat/chat.html ... or
         Kirsten Dunst comes of age in wrong-side-of-the-tracks teen
         romance drama CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL (http://www.cndb.com/ : the
         nudity was cut from the film. It was replaced with a scene
         with [Dunst] wearing just underwear; a clear view of the
         underside of her breast at least once)...

         DRESS DOWN FRIDAY>> sorry, no new designs this month - we're
         in the process of reworking the shop to accommodate everyone
         who's asked for everything in girls' sizes, or XXL, or black,
         or all three. Or shipped to the southern hemisphere, for that
         matter: "You're right, it's getting a bit chilly here at the
         tip of Africa - temperature's dropped to the mid-20s",
         confirmed PAUL W from his .za domain, following NTK 2001-05-
         18's jibe: "Isn't it winter over there?". "With the mercury
         hitting a dizzy 10 degrees at Bristol airport a couple of days
         ago," Paul adds, "I can appreciate your desire to hold on to
         all the T-shirts you can". More specifically, if anyone wants
         to buy any of the current range - "Encoded" now back in stock
         in both Medium and XL, "Adminspotting" back in more sizes next
         month - then do so at http://www.geekstyle.co.uk/ before the
         start of October, when the "changes" will commence... many
         would-be designers out there seemed to be actively encouraged
         by the "increasing trends towards the upsetting and bizarre"
         reported in NTK 2001-07-20, as ANDY PANDINI swept the board
         for worst pun of the month with his firmly non-sexist "Knead
         To Know" concept: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkfemale.jpg - or,
         for men: http://www.pandini.co.uk/ntkmale.jpg . Most prolific
         was TARAS YOUNG, who submitted no less than 6 different
         designs - http://www.strugglers.net/~taras/images/shirt/ - of
         which our favourites are probably "treeloot" and "rebelgoat",
         though we're not sure if the digitised goat is a Jeff Minter
         trademark, while THE TARTARUS COLLECTIVE explored similar
         themes with their largely self-explanatory "Keep Mordor Tidy":
         http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/things/kmt.png ... "Elite"
         author IAN BELL and MATTHEW GARRETT both went amazingly self-
         referential with http://www.ibell.co.uk/misc/tshirt/ntk404.htm
         and http://zeus.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mjg59/tshirt.html , and CHRIS
         HEALEY apologised for his "non-existent Paintshop skills", but
         explained that "anger got the better of me" and went ahead
         with http://www.arco.ndirect.co.uk/images/tshirt.jpg anyway...
         of course, if you can't design, you can just send in a slogan
         - or, if you can't think of a slogan, you can redesign someone
         else's (we'd still like a more "visual" interpretation of last
         month's: http://www.tartarus.org/~simon/tshirt.png ). Topping
         the text-only weirdness this time around was BODO MOELLER's
         "Personally, I prefer T-shirts with nothing printed on them.
         Consequently, I recently had myself made a couple of T-shirts
         saying 'This shirt intentionally left blank'"; the suggestion
         from JO3SH that we replace all the usual "Jesus [is Lord etc]"
         bumper stickers with "Linus" instead ("Honk if you love Linus.
         And so on"); and ALEX TEUGELS who, during the course of
         discussing whether there was a "Police Aware" complement to
         Toxico's "Police State" design, came up with the inspirational
         "Talk to the router, 'coz the host ain't listenin'". As ever,
         let us know if you could wear (or improve) any of the above,
         and we *will* get round to printing more in the future, just
         you see if we don't...


                               >> SMALL PRINT <<

       Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that
         happened last week or might happen next week. You can read it
       on Friday afternoon or print it out then take it home if you have
     nothing better to do. It is compiled by NTK from stuff they get sent.
                       Registered at the Post Office as
            "a breath of fresh air? Isn't that a little tasteless?"
       http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4260488,00.html


                                 NEED TO KNOW
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